In recent years, with rapid development in the semiconductor industry, development of semiconductor devices is oriented towards a trend of smaller dimension, higher circuit density, faster operation speed and lower power consumption; integrated circuits have entered a technical phase of submicron level nowadays. Therefore, in order to meet the demands of smaller dimension and higher density, requirements have been proposed in two aspects so far: on the one hand, it is required that the diameter of wafers should be gradually increased; silicon wafers with diameter of 300 mm have become the mainstream products by 2005, and it is predicted that silicon wafers with diameter of 450 mm (18 in) will come into use in 2012; the diameter of wafers is continuously expanded at a rate of about 1.5 times every 9 years, and wafers are evolved to have larger areas. On the other hand, another need also comes up, namely, it is desired to improve the utilization rate of surface areas of existing wafers without increasing dimensions of existing wafers, so as to increase surface areas thereof that can be processed.
Conventional materials like SiO2, SiN exhibit significant brittleness during manufacturing of semiconductor devices. Therefore, when used to manufacture devices with thin film structure such as solar cells, the materials like SiO2, SiN would rupture easily because of bending or stretching and then cause the connected device structure to break apart, which consequently destroys to the whole device structure or results in low yield or productivity of device manufacturing.